It’s Christmas eve and we’re looking for God. We’re watching two TVs, football on one and on the other, for some reason, we’re watching a Band of Brothers marathon. Band of Brothers of course being the saga of Easy Company spitting blood and bullets across Europe from D-Day to the end of World War II … and so we sit, hunkered down in our 21st-century bunkers, feeling bad that we can’t drink beers on the sidewalk in a suburb of a country that has fought and died over stuff so much more epic than the flu.

And so it starts to rain. Unexpected, not much of a rain, but it produced a rainbow, an earthly miracle, colors of possibilities and dimension that inspire creativity and dreams. Nights before we saw the Christmas Star, the alignment of planets that legend says is the same celestial formation that guided the Three Kings to the Christ Child. Life is often a strange juxtaposition.

The football action is being viewed through the silly lens of Fantasy Football – a gambling mechanism designed to distort reality and ruin the beauty and rhythm of the game we all loved so much. Success in real football is at least partially based on strategy and teamwork and the execution of a bunch men working together, and while the pigskin may take an unexpected bounce at times, you can mostly rely on the outcome having something to do with the best team rising to the top.

Victory in Fantasy Football conversely is almost always achieved by a single factor – luck. And as such, it exactly resembles the human interaction with the Chinese flu. Your Fantasy Football roster can be filled with topnotch players, but they are quite likely to get hurt or they can go entire quarters without touching the ball or they can be replaced in the lineup at any time by a completely unknown receiver from Northern Midwestern Tech because contrived statistics tell the coaches he’s the best guy when the ball is on the left hash when it’s slightly sprinkling and the wind is blowing eight MPH from the east.

Your Fantasy Football prospects are completely controlled by luck. Same thing with the flu. Nobody knows shit. Every advisory from every expert is contradictory. Follow all of the so-called rules and, without luck, you’re still likely to get sick. Wash the skin off of your hands, and luck can still conspire against you. Wear a mask, over a bandana beneath a plastic shield, and since nobody really knows how to track flu carriers then, well, you’re still gonna need to be lucky.

So the moral of the story, the only way to keep your gambling money in your pocket and the Chinese flu out of your bloodstream is to avoid Fantasy Football and all human contact.

In other words, just give up the human freedoms the Band of Brothers gave you. Good luck.

Photo on Best Running